COLLECTION OF ANCIENT BOOKS ON CHESS GIVEN TO WIDENER

A. C. White '02, of Litchfield, Connecticut, has given the Widener Library a collection of works on chess from the library of the late J. C. J. Wainwright, a famous problem composer. It has been suggested that all the books on chess which Mr. White has given be united to form a collection known as the J. C. J. Wainwright collection.

Several of the books are bound copies of the American Chess Bulletin which Mr. Wainwright won in problem tourneys. One of the books is a very rare edition of a treatise by Jacopo da Cessole and was printed in 1532. This is the work which Caxton translated and printed as "The Game and Playe of the Chesse"--the second book printed in England. There is also a learned work in Latin and Hebrew by Thomas Hyde, professor of Oriental languages at Oxford at the close of the seventeenth century. The Widener copy of this "Shahiludium" is of the extremely rare edition of 1689. No copy of this edition appears in the standard bibliography on the subject or in any of the great collections of chess books.

Included in the collection is also a very interesting copy of the first edition (1564) of Ruy Lopez' "Libro del Juego del Axedrez" which was given the College by Buckingham Smith, 1836, who evidently found it at Saint Augustine, Florida, when he was there in the 1840's. There is also a copy of a treatise in Latin written by an Italian lawyer, Tomasso Azzio, and printed in 1583 and a rather amusing work published in Boston in 1805. This last work, the "Elements of Chess", was the second book on the subject published in America and reflects the revolutionary sentiments of the times in the suggestion that more democratic names be used for the pieces than those of "king", "queen" and "knight" which they then bore.